Criminal justice: Was alibi ignored in '92 double murder?

Prosecutors' reinvestigation of case under scrutiny

May 07, 2012|By Steve Mills, Chicago Tribune reporter

Newly obtained reports suggest that prosecutors reinvestigating a 1992 double murder ignored Daniel Taylor’s claim that he was in a police lockup at the time of the slayings. Taylor is serving a life sentence without parole in Chester, Ill. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune 2010)

In 2002, Cook County prosecutors undertook what then was a most unusual inquiry: the reinvestigation of a double-murder case that sent five young men to prison, even though one of them had records showing he was in a Chicago police lockup when the crime occurred.

About a year later, in March 2003, the office of then-State's Attorney Richard Devine announced that it was satisfied the convictions were sound in spite of a Tribune investigation that had uncovered new evidence suggesting that the young man, Daniel Taylor, was innocent.

Nearly a decade later, reports from that investigation — obtained by the Tribune from sources after State's Attorney Anita Alvarez's office refused to make them available to the newspaper — raise questions about how the investigation was done and whether it was evenhanded.

According to the reports, investigators and on some occasions prosecutors working under Devine interviewed the five men who were convicted and three other men who were arrested, some of them twice and one of them three times, plus some civilian witnesses linked to the case.

But investigators interviewed only one of the officers involved in the original investigation — and, according to the reports, none of the officers who provided Taylor with his seemingly ironclad alibi. The investigators also did not question the detectives or prosecutors involved in taking the disputed confessions, according to the reports.

What's more, prosecutors announced they were certain Taylor was guilty after they had completed fewer than two-thirds of the interviews they ultimately conducted and before they spoke with Taylor or with a man identified as the real killer by the one defendant who admits he was at the crime scene.

The nearly 100 pages of reports suggest that Devine's office put effort into finding evidence to support the conviction but little into investigating Taylor's claim of innocence. The state's attorney's investigators sought out girlfriends of several of the suspects, an indication they were seeking incriminating evidence. They also obtained pages and pages of CTA bus schedules; one former state's attorney's investigator who worked on the case said he had tried to determine if Taylor could have ridden a bus to the scene of the crime.

In spite of all that, the suspects continued to assert their innocence. No one implicates Taylor, who is serving a sentence of life without parole, or any of the suspects save the one who admitted a role in the double murders, Dennis Mixon.

"I just don't see how the state's attorney's office can truly say they reinvestigated Daniel's case, or reached any conclusions about his guilt or innocence, without going back and interviewing the police lockup officers who had him in custody at the time of the murder," said Karen Daniel, who is Taylor's lawyer and an attorney at Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions. "They didn't do that. The ironic thing is that despite avoiding some of the most important witnesses, their reinvestigation failed to turn up any evidence of Daniel's guilt and in fact provided additional support of his innocence."

Alvarez's office, which did not handle the investigation but now is defending the conviction in state court — Alvarez succeeded Devine — declined to comment on the Taylor reinvestigation. The Illinois attorney general's office is handling the appeal as it moves through federal court.

Devine, who now is in private practice, did not review the reports from the reinvestigation but said he spoke with one person currently in the state's attorney's office and one person who used to be in the office to refresh his recollection of the case. He said he "can't imagine" that prosecutors and investigators did not interview the officers who supported Taylor's alibi — although no reports indicate that such interviews were conducted. One of the investigators who worked on the reinvestigation, Ron Armata, said they would have documented any interview they conducted.

Devine said he never would have ordered an investigation that was not meant to be fair to Taylor or the other men convicted.

"This was meant to be a full investigation, and it's not my sense that anyone was playing games with it," said Devine, who added that the investigators also followed any leads provided by Taylor's attorney at the time, Kathleen Zellner. "There was never any ambition to circumvent this."

Zellner said she provided leads to the prosecutors but also expected that they would investigate Taylor's alibi as part of their inquiry.